As stated in my last post, a very big weekend is coming up for the Exodus: Empires at War series. For those who have not read the series, there are currently five books out, and they have sold over 58,000 copies between them. Not in the range of David Weber, but pretty damned good for something I have had to self promote. There are over 550 reviews worldwide, mostly on Amazon US and UK, and an overall rating of 4.4 stars. They have been compared to Weber, Ringo and others, and I have developed a very loyal fan base that includes physicists, mathematicians, ex and current military, and even an astronaut, as well as science fiction fans old and young. I am very proud of the series. Could it be better? Most definitely. One improvement could be the covers, and I have gone ahead and made that improvement on book one.

On April 25th through 29th Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1, will be available for free download on Amazon. I made up a new cover for the book, something I think is more colorful and attractive. For those who haven’t read this series, this is the chance to get in on the ground floor for free.

On April 27th the 6th book of the series, The Day of Battle, will be released. I will be uploading the book to Amazon on the evening of the 26th, and it will probably be available by 2 or 3 AM eastern time. I couldn’t imagine this before it happened, but there were some fans who actually stayed up late to snag the book as soon as they could. Unlike the last volume, this novel will follow the main storyline. It will be the most action packed book of the series though. Some people liked the ground action, so there is plenty of ground action, including a tank battle and several spaceship and station boarding battles. And most said they wanted more space battles. I think there are over a dozen, from several page shorts to a massive action at the climax. I think it is the best book of the series. Of course, I don’t get to make that determination. That’s for the fans. I can only hope that the people who read this book like it as much as its predecessors. And now for an excerpt:

“They’re heading this way, sir,” said Lieutenant SG Lasardo, the Tactical Officer of the destroyer, and a man who von Rittersdorf had handpicked for the position. “No surprise there.”

And why the hell did I have to tell the Commodore that this was a good idea. His was the only hyper VII capable ship in the escort, and the only ship likely to get away if they ran. The three hyper VI destroyers might make it, while the VI light cruiser wouldn’t have much of a chance. He was in charge by dint of being a squadron commander, though the rest of his squadron was with the Commodore. That, and the fact that his ship was equipped with a wormhole com. I wish I had some of the other stuff he Commodore’s ship has, he thought, knowing that such would not be wasted on a mere destroyer.

“Get me the Commodore on the com,” he told his Com Officer. It’s about time to make sure everyone is on the same page.

* * *

The Commodore stared at the holo, watching the movement of every ship in hyper V. Her own command was superimposed on that holo, sitting in normal space, coasting at point two c to the point of entry, while the timer ticked down. Everything was set into motion. Her force was tracking the enemy both through their hyperdrive emissions as received in normal space, and the tracking information of von Rittersdorf’s vessel coming through the wormhole. She had unprecedented tracking capabilities, and hopefully weapons that were beyond the wildest dreams of the Cacas, especially in a knife fight like she was developing.

“All stations report readiness status green,” said the Com Officer, looking back at the Commodore.

Mei looked over at the com station, noting the holo of an officer above the board, the Com Officer on one of the battle stations sitting over a thousand light years away, orbiting the Supersystem black hole.

“The stations are reporting that they have fifty missiles in each tube,” said the Com Officer. “They’ll be up to max velocity in one point three minutes.”

“What about the PBs?” asked Mei.

The Com Officer went to her board for a moment, then looked back. “All particle beams are fully up and ready.”

“Let the force know we will go on the mark. Philippi and Dauphin will follow our lead. Targets are designated as…” The Commodore pointed to the target icons on the holo and assigned them to her vessels. “We jump in forty-three seconds.”

The Commodore stared at the holo, watching as the icons of her force, eleven battle cruisers, four heavy cruisers and fourteen destroyers, closed to superimposition with the enemy force.

“Jumping, now,” called out the Navigation Officer, looking over at the Helmsman.

The lights on the bridge dimmed for a moment as all available power was transferred to the hyperdrive projectors without tapping into the battery backups. With the transfer came the nausea, for most only a second or so. And then the stars of space were replaced by the red backdrop of hyperspace splattered with the tiny black dots of the distant gravity wells that were stars.

The tactical holo updated with real time information in less than a second. Before the next second ticked off every ship had opened fire, well before the enemy could react.

* * *

“The enemy ships are opening fire,” called out the Tactical Officer, as hundreds of red icons appeared on the tactical holo.

“How are they getting so many missiles into space?” asked the Task Force Commander.

“Their commercial vessels are also sending missiles our way,” said the Tactical Officer. “From their velocity I would guess they don’t have acceleration tubes. I don’t think they will be much of a threat.”

The Task Force Leader sat back in his chair and grinned. The enemy was getting desperate. But desperation would not save them.

“We have translations,” yelled out the Sensor Officer.

“Where,” yelled the Task Force Leader, coming out of his seat.

“Right on top of us,” yelled the officer, as the icons of enemy vessels appeared on the tactical plot.

Something flared impossibly bright on one of the viewers, which stepped down the intensity in an instant. Two of the icons on the tactical were blinking, one of his battleships, and a scout ship of the enemy. The biggest problem with the icons was they were right on top of each other. Which meant an enemy scout ship had translated right into the path of a battleship, if not directly inside of it.

A side viewer showed the debris of a twenty-five million ton battleship fading from hyper in a series of catastrophic translations. Not that it mattered to any of the crew of that ship, who were most decidedly dead. And then the flagship shook from the hits of an impossibly powerful particle beam, while damage klaxons went off and the lights dimmed again.

* * *

Mei Lei grimaced as the enemy force appeared on the viewer. Not just because they outmassed her force. She was very close to the enemy task force, a lot closer than most captains would be comfortable with. Something flared on the screen, and she grimaced again as she watched one of her destroyers come out of hyper halfway inside an enemy battleship. Both ships fell apart from the combined forces of objects trying to occupy the same space at the same time, and the difference in velocities and vectors that tore at them.

In the cold calculations of war of attrition, she should have been happy with that result, trading two hundred tons of warship and two hundred and fifty lives for twenty-five million tons and many thousands of the enemy. But all she could think about were the brave men and women of that ship who hadn’t even had time to realize they were doomed.

“Firing,” yelled out the Tactical Officer, and the ship bucked as she fired all weapons at the nearest enemy vessel, a battleship.

All of the vessels in her force opened up with lasers and particle beams, tossing missiles at the same time, giving the enemy some extra targets to deal with. All but three of the ships were equipped with standard weapons loadouts for their classes. Jean de Arc and her two sisters had the normal loadout, with the exception of the two wormhole weapons’ ports each carried.

The three battle cruisers each let loose with a pair of massive particle weapons, the pairs of beams all striking a different battleship. The enemy ships were moving at point three five c, while the human vessels were moving at an almost parallel vector to the Cacas at point two c. The beams were from accelerators much larger than the battle cruisers would have been capable of carrying without dispensing with most of their other weapons. Those accelerators were actually over a thousand light years away, on purpose built battle stations in orbit around the Supersystem central black hole. Each accelerator massed over four million tons, half the mass of the ships they were feeding. Protons, or in this case, antiprotons, were accelerated up to point nine nine nine nine c, and fed through the wormhole to the projectors of the battle cruisers.

A ton a second of ultrafast particles fired from the two projectors on each ship, while the battle cruisers engaged their grabbers at full power to compensate for the recoil. All three eight point five million ton ships actually lost forward velocity in the classic action-reaction formula.

Jean de Arc’s twin particle beams ripped into the side of one of the battleships, antimatter exploding as it powered into the material of the hull. The enemy ships hadn’t deployed cold plasma fields, and their electromag fields were not at full strength. Huge pieces of hull blew off into space and translated away, while the beam dug deeper into the vessel. There were seven seconds of firing time for each beam, which was about what the opening distance and the time the material of the beam could exist in hyperspace would allow anyway.

Smaller explosions sparked on the surface of many more enemy ships, and Mei knew that more deadly interior explosions were also rocking those vessels. All of the warships carried quantum teleportation devices, and were taking their best shot at sending more of the deadly substance into the enemy vessels. The loss of weapons fire and targeting of many of those vessels showed that the strategy was working.

Two battle cruisers and a heavy cruiser were gushing atmosphere, and one of the battle cruisers blew up in a flash and disappeared. Several destroyers were also taking a pounding while they continued to take the nearest enemy ships under fire. Enemy missiles were closing at relatively slow velocity, most to be taken out by defensive fire, though several got through to blast gigatons of explosive power into the hulls of light vessels. The defensive fire of the Ca’cadasan ships was proving too much for the human missiles, which, with a few exceptions, were being blown out of space.

At seven seconds the particle beam fired died, and the Commodore sweated for the thirty seconds it took to move the wormhole at the other end to access the next weapons system. Two savaged enemy battleships continued on, one so badly damaged that it was not able to alter its vector of velocity. And one ship flashed into catastrophic translation, gone.

“First missile due in twelve seconds,” stated the Com Officer, as the Tactical Officer gave a thumbs up to the Commodore, indicated that the hole had been mated at the other end.

“Light them up, Tac,” ordered the Commodore. The officer smiled back, looked back to his board, and started sending firing solutions to the first missiles to come through.

Just got back from my very first DragonCon. I attended something called Altcon in Tallahassee in the Spring, which wasn’t bad, but it was a one day affair with two or three presentation rooms and no one really famous. This was the real deal. Four host hotels in downtown Atlanta, plus some overflow hotels (I was actually out at the Airport Hilton, miles and miles away, but with shuttle buses and Marta it was not a big deal). Tens of thousands of people. Authors and celebrities that most people have heard of. And Costumes. Some kind of ridiculous, like the overweight Spartan with the spray painted abs. Some fantastic, like the cow headed demon who projected smoke through his nostrils and several Iron-Man suits that were flawless. Or the Star Wars Storm Trooper with the Ewok head on his spear. Really cute girls dressed as elves, anime characters, you name it. Sometimes there seemed to be too many people, and I thought of new and inventive ways to do in large numbers of people while trying to get through them. Those methods may go into future books. I talked to lots of people, and found many who had loved the same books, movies and TV shows that I did. Standing in one line a guy looked at my name tag and told me he was reading the third book in my series, then asked what was going to happen in book 4. I loved that, and really want to see as much of that as possible in the future (more on that in another post).

The parade was really first class. Squads of Boba Fetts, platoons of Storm Troopers, quartets of Batmans, scores of boxy superheroes, a guy in an authentic, and very hot, Wookie suit. Even a Jurassic Park Jeep and a Batmobile from the original series. I stood next to a Thor with a really cool hammer, but also saw a Bubba Thor wearing overalls and carrying a hammer made with a Budweiser box. I went as Indiana Jones on Saturday, and got in a couple of pictures. I soon found that wearing a leather jacket in Atlanta in August was not really a good idea. And some people were in costumes that had to be hell to wear.

I originally planned on seeing a lot of the celebrities, especially William Shatner and George Takei. After attending the writer’s workshop I signed up for it shifted to seeing authors. And getting worn out walking from hotel to hotel got me focused on going to presentations in the writer’s track that were in adjacent rooms. And the networking I really didn’t expect that may lead to some really great things in the near future. I will do a future post on the authors I met and how impressed I was with them. Of course a convention meant not enough sleep. Not because of noise. The Airport Hilton was very quiet. Just a different bed and not the same little noises I’m use to.

The one true celebrity panel I went to had Christopher Judge on it, Teal’c on Stargate SG-1. On the show his character is almost always wearing a frown. On the panel Christopher was constantly laughing and telling jokes and playing the crowd. He was a riot. I asked the panel about the writing for SG-1, which featured very good treatments of scifi themes from many of the classics. He explained that the writers were real science fiction fans who understood the genre and respected the fans. Was glad to hear that, because so much else I heard during the Con was about how Hollywood will change scripts so they won’t effect the spin off marketing, and how they really don’t respect the intelligence of scifi fans. Christopher was unusual because he played college football to get the scholarship so he could study theater and acting. Very intelligent guy and I left the presentation hoping there were many good things ahead for the big man.

My next post will be the final installment of A New Life, the serial short story I have been posting. After that I will a couple more posts on DragonCon, One will cover the authors I saw and my impressions of them, almost all good. And finally about how the networking I did, mostly unintentional, could lead to some big things.

Tomorrow I will be putting another novel up on Amazon, and no, it will not be the third book or the Exodus, Refuge or Deep Dark Well series. The third books of all those series will be out this year, starting with Exodus next month. But I needed something to do with my spare time (LOL) while I had put Exodus 3 to bed for a short break and was working on the first draft of Refuge 3. I actually finished the first draft of We Are Death in January of 2012, after a horrible 2011 in which I started 7 books a finished none (more to come on those, as all will be finished, some day, and two others were). That was after an 2012 in which I completed five first drafts, including the two very long manuscripts that eventually became books one and two of both Refuge and Exodus. Originally with a working title of Tau Ceti, after the Earth colony mentioned in the first chapter. I then titled it The Last Invasion of Sol, but also didn’t like that title all that much. So I thought one of the statements by my antagonists might make a good title.
The idea for this novel came about from the movie Independence Day, and in fact I think of it as my Anti-Independence Day. Now there were a lot of things I liked about ID, great effects, big name stars, but horrible script writing. The two things that bothered me most were that a virus written on Microsoft could infect an alien computer system, and a tactical nuke could destroy a ship a quarter the mass of the Moon. I know, screen writers tend to think that all nukes are equal, big flippen devices that can destroy just about everything, but it just ain’t so. Add to that the tired trope of aliens trying to take the Earth for our resources, when there are more resources in space than at the bottom of our gravity well, and the movie has the same ridiculous antagonist motivations of many aliens before and since. So I decided to go with a different motivation, a simpler one. The aliens are death worshippers intent on destroying all life in the Universe, including, eventually, their own. And we know they are coming, having seen them first destroy one of our colonies on a laser transmission, then see them coming across the light years in their sublight ships. Needless to say, the aliens have superior tech, mostly, versus the industrial base of the Solar System. But never count humanity out. Some of their tech is more advanced, other tech isn’t, and humanity is a past master of space warfare.
As said, the book will be on Amazon tomorrow. Official release day will be Friday, April 19, and the book will be offered for 99 cents on the 19th and the 20th. It is a stand alone novel with a lot of action throughout. I hope all of my readers enjoy it. And remember, Exodus, Refuge and The Deep Dark Well books three are coming.

Welcome to the first of what I hope will become a weekly blog entry on movies, fantastic and otherwise. Since I went and saw this movie in Imax yesterday I thought I would start out with this one. Of course I went and saw Jurassic Park at the theater when it first came out. And then bought the DVD as soon as it came out (or was it a VHS, I really can’t remember). It was much better than either of the sequels, which is not unusual. I have always been a big dinosaur fan, growing up like most kids with a love of the big guys. Of course, at that time most believed that dinosaurs were slow moving, cold blooded creatures. I read a book called Hot Blooded Dinosaurs by L. Sprague de Camp (yes, the scifi and fantasy writer) in which a new viewpoint was put forth that the creatures were actually warm blooded and quick moving. I embraced this theory, and was ridiculed by many friends. I was later vindicated, as now most scientist believe dinosaurs were indeed warm blooded and fleet of foot. So I grew up watching all the dinosaur and other big creature movies. My father told me about seeing King Kong in the theaters, and how the Willis O’Brien ape and dinosaurs looked very real to him. O’Brien did many other animated features (moving models around and photographing them) over the years, as did his protege’, Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen extended the art to its ultimate, and the dinosaurs in The Valley of Gwangi looked very real to this child when I saw that movie. And of course there were the monsters that were nothing more than men in suits, Godzilla, Gamera, and the English takeoff, Gorgo. And I remember the awful slow moving animatronic beasts in The Lost World with Doug McClure. Like most zombies, you could slowly walk away from these creatures. And then along came Jurassic Park, and Dinosaurs were made real on the big screen. Of course there were some very well done beasts in movies before this, the dragon in Dragonslayer comes to mind, but most were only good because we hadn’t seen anything better. (Saw Dragonslayer recently and the dragon holds up well in modern times). I remember reading somewhere that originally the movie was to use animatronics, though I hope better ones than The Lost World (or was it The Land That Time Forgot?) And then someone told Spielberg that they could do something much better with computers. And now we have all those wonderful BBC dinosaur shows.
The dinosaurs in the new presentation of Jurassic Park looked much like those in the old one. Very well rendered, they looked like living creatures. I remember when I first saw them on the big screen I thought we had arrived, now we had animals that looked real. So Jurassic Park Imax 3-D did not really improve on the animals. They were on a larger screen, which made them look bigger, and the 3-D to me really didn’t improve on the experience. Oh, it was good 3-D, but again 3-D sometimes looks really cool, and at other times just seems like a wasted trick. And it still had the one complaint I had about the original presentation (since that’s basically what it was). There were not enough shots of the dinosaurs. I wanted to see more Brachiosaurs, Duckbills and others. Instead there was a lot of talking, with Laura Dern telling the old park developer how he had made a fatal error. If you liked the original Jurassic Park (which I did) the movie is still good. I really didn’t think the 3-D and the larger screen did anything for it though. You can buy the original movie on Blue Ray for just a bit more and watch it as many times as you want.

I remember watching the movie Logan’s Run back in the 70s. Also read the book and saw the not so good TV series. In Logan’s Run people were only allowed to live to 30 (in the book it was even younger). Then they faced Last Day, the day they were killed in a ritual, from which the people were told their souls would ascend and then reenter the body of a newborn.
Today was my Last Day at the State of Florida, though I didn’t have to attend a ritual that killed me. No, I walked out the door with my belongings, walked to my car, and drove away from what was a very difficult period of my life. Department of Children and Families Abuse Hotline was not an easy master. We did some good, but I also believe we hassled some people who really didn’t need us in their lives. Add to that low pay, no raises for five years, and directives that seemed to have been written by a thousand monkeys on typewriters, and made as much sense, and I am very happy to have walked out of that place of employment alive. Along the way I learned a lot, about people, about bureaucracy, about the evil that people do to their own. And about the craft of writing. I left some good people there, friends that I had seen every week for the last seven plus years.
Like the people in Logan’s Run, I entered Last Day expecting a rebirth. In my case it came true, and I leave this day as my own boss. I am now a full time author, able to make use of my time as I wish. If I want to be a successful author I will use that time wisely, to produce as much as I can, while I can. This weekend I will be completing the purchase of a motorcycle, and will be back on two wheels after a two year hiatus. That is part of this lifestyle as well, to get some enjoyment from each day that is not work related. I will also be setting up a work computer at home that should keep me near the cutting edge for the next couple of years.
I see big things for this blog in the near future as well. I have let it fall off a bit as other tasks took up my time. In the future I would like to have four entries a week. One will be about movies I have seen, and not just new releases, but also old classics. Another will be a blog on books, mostly in the realm of the fantastic, though maybe also something to do with history or science. The third entry will be about tropes, or science fallacies, or anything else that strikes my fancy, enrages me, amuses me, whatever. The last will be a shameless promotion of my own writing. It really is funny how I hated that kind of promotion when I started the self publishing thing in December of 2011. Writer friends of mine think it had a huge part to play in successfully selling lots of ebooks, and I can’t say that they’re wrong. Now I enjoy promoting, to a point. As long as it doesn’t interfere with all the other tasks required to put out a good science fiction or fantasy book.
Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my writing career. Follow me on this blog and see how I do.

I went to see this movie last weekend, and was looking forward to it after seeing the previews before some other movies. You know how that goes; sometimes they live up to expectations, other times they don’t. Now I grew up on the original The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland. It was a big TV event every year, and every year it was a family event to watch it. It was amazing that a movie made in the early days of color was so good. Of course the new movie is a prequel, I guess you would say, to a movie that was made seventy four years ago. Of course the effects and the backgrounds were better, but just because a movie has better special effects does not make it as good. However, Oz did not disappoint this movie goer. From the opening in black and white Kansas, to the land of Oz in full glorious color, to the climax of the film, is was wonderful.
Not to spoil the movie, but Oz is about an illusionist, womanizer and con man working a traveling circus who, running from a jealous boyfriend, jumps on a hot air balloon. He is sucked into a tornado and ends up in Oz, where he is seen as the fulfillment to a prophecy. Of course the con man takes advantage of the situation, and his self serving behavior actually makes things worse. But his very behavior as a con man and illusionist allows him to combat the wicked witches at the end. To this movie goer the coolest thing about the film was how it could seamlessly lead into the original. A lot of origins were explained, and everything was kept true enough to the Wizard of Oz that you could watch them back to back and come away with the feeling that they were made that way. Highly recommended, and I give it five stars.

A couple of months ago I ran through my extended editions of all three of the Lord of the Rings films by Peter Jackson. And once again I was impressed with how good they were. Now I have some friends who, even though they liked the movies, still didn’t think they were enough. One old friend would have liked to see sixty one hour episodes in a TV series, even though TV wouldn’t have spent the bucks to get the big screen masterpiece that resulted from it being filmed as a major motion picture. Another complained that there was no Tom Bombadil. Now Tom might have added something to the movie, but really wasn’t central to the storyline, which had to be cut in some places, so that the four hour extended versions could actually be filmed. One complaint I heard several times was the use of Arwin in the movies. She really wasn’t shown much in the books, only really a passing mention in a couple of places. But when the novel was written a fantasy story could be told without too much character development, and today people want romance in the stories they read or see, just a bit. So Hollywood added that romance by a little more development of Arwin, in the only way it can be done in a film, by showing it.

Now all of the Lord of the Rings movies were good. You could see the development of the effects through the films, which got better as the series progressed. Makes sense, as new techniques and technologies were developed through those years. But the sum of the parts was better than the individual segments. The series was amazing in many respects. The production quality was amazing. The cast of characters was maintained through the three movies, something very difficult to do. I have seen many sequels in the past where a new actor played a character, and we were supposed to completely ignore that they were not the same person that played the part in the preceding film. Not so with Lord of the Rings. They kept the entire cast intact for the entire movie series. Frodo, Gandalf, Sam, Aragorn, Elrond, Galadriel, Saroman, Merry and Pippen. The gang stayed for all the movies. Now I know there are contracts, and I’m sure everyone was signed to one, but that doesn’t always prevent people from leaving. The second amazing thing was how the series fitted together like one seamless story, with the tension growing from episode to episode. Remember the big battle scene in Fellowship. Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli and Legalos versus the Uraki. Oh, and a couple of Hobbits as well. The Two Towers featured an Army of ten thousand Uraki versus the defenders of Helms Deep, augmented by several thousand cavalry. Sure, there were some liberties taken with Helms Deep, like the inclusion of elves, but all in all it was a great battle scene. And then the battles of Return of the King, the great cavalry charge against the massive army of Orcs. The fight with the Olifants. Everything building to the final scene when the great eye crashes to the ground. It was definitely Jackson’s masterpiece, and an effort to be proud of. I bought the complete extended edition when it came out, retiring my standard editions, which were still good, but just not enough compared to those extra three hours of magical scenes.

Yes, Lord of the Rings was the ultimate fantasy experience. It had magic, a Balrog, great armies, single battles, dwarven mines and Elfin forests. It had flashbacks to the past that filled in the story for those who didn’t know it. It added a love story to the mix. The only thing it didn’t have was a dragon, and we have that coming in the Hobbit, Jackson’s future release. I think the money I spent on the extended additions is a good investment. I will probably watch it at least once a year for the rest of my life, and enjoy it every time.